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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

What Is Increasing Human Intelligence?

The Flynn effect is a well-documented effect that involves a gradual
increase in performance in intelligence tests. The increase seems to
be about 3% per decade, and has seemingly been occurring since the
1930's. Some of the implications are startling -- for example, that
before many decades have passed, the average person living will have
an intelligence level of the average Harvard freshman today.

There
have been various attempts to naturally explain the Flynn effect, but
none have been very convincing. One attempted explanation has been
that nutrition has been better in recent decades. But James Flynn has
pointed out that there was a steady growth of IQ scores among Dutch
people between 1952 and 1982, even though those taking the test
around 1962 should have suffered from worsened nutrition as children
during World War II (there was a Dutch famine in 1944). Also, there
is little evidence that very many US children suffered from
malnutrition between 1940 and 1970. So it's not like we can say, “Only in
recent decades have American children started to eat properly.”

People
trying to account for the Flynn effect usually consider only the
period from 1930 onward. But the apparent increase in human
intelligence since 1930 may be only one facet of a larger mystery of
unaccountable increases in human intelligence, a mystery that may
stretch back many thousands of years.

Consider
the blossoming of human intelligence that occurred long ago. Rather
suddenly, humans started to grow crops, and not too long after that,
humans started to create cities. Before long we had things such as
the glories of Greek sculpture, the philosophy of Plato, the
mathematical works of Euclid, and the architectural and
organizational achievements of the Roman Empire. But we cannot
explain the intelligence behind such things by using natural
selection as an explanation. As Alfred Russel Wallace (the
co-founder of the theory of natural selection) pointed out in the
nineteenth century, natural selection can only explain features that
are needed for an organism to survive in the wild.

So we
have a general mystery that exceeds the mystery of the Flynn effect.
The mystery is: why has human intelligence increased at various times
in ways we cannot explain?

I will
now suggest a highly unconventional hypothesis to explain the Flynn
effect. The Flynn effect may be evidence that human intelligence is
being gradually increased by some external reality that is a partial
or major source of human consciousness. Such a reality may be
gradually increasing human intelligence to help us cope with an
increasingly complex world, or to help us fulfill some human destiny
that requires greater human intelligence.

To
understand this hypothesis, I must first explain what is meant by
neural reductionism, and why there are strong reasons for rejecting
this assumption. Neural reductionism is a theory of the mind and
brain that you have probably heard advanced many times. It is the
idea that mind or intelligence is purely a product of the brain. A
neural reductionist believes that your brain generates your
intelligence rather like your liver secretes bile.

But
there are quite a few reasons for doubting this simple theory. One
reason is that we cannot plausibly account for very long-term human
memories through any neurological explanation, mainly because (as discussed here) very
rapid molecular turnover in the brain should make the brain an
unsuitable substrate for a 50-year storage of memories, or even a
storage of memories lasting longer than two years. Another reason is
that the physician John Lorber documented many cases of people who
functioned well even though the great majority of their brains were
destroyed by disease. Another reason is that neural reductionism
cannot account for psychic phenomena such as near-death experiences,
out-of-body experiences, and extra-sensory perception (the latter
something very well-demonstrated in convincing
laboratory experiments such as those done by Professor Joseph Rhine,
which have never been successfully debunked).

Suppose
we consider possibilities other than neural reductionism. It may be
that our consciousness and intelligence comes largely or mainly from some mysterious
external reality outside of our brains.

Let's
imagine a 10-year-old child who enters some data into a smartphone.
If you ask the child where that data is stored, the child will say
something like: “Why in the smartphone, of course – where else
could it be?” But depending on the smartphone app being used, the
data may not be stored in the smartphone. It could be the app uses a
wi-fi connection to connect to an external web server that connects
to a relational database server which stores the data the child has
entered into the smartphone. But the child knows nothing of such an
unseen infrastructure, so of course when she is asked where her data
is stored, she answers that it is in the smartphone. Similarly, our
long-term memories and intelligence may depend on some mysterious
consciousness and information storage infrastructure that is outside
of our brains. But since a scientist knows nothing of such an
infrastructure, when he is asked where our memories are stored, he
answers: “In the brain, of course – where else could it be?”

And if
the child uses her smartphone to do a math problem, and you ask her,
“Where was the intelligence that helped you do that?” the child
will answer, “In the smartphone, of course – where else could it
be?” But the actual facility that helped her may be a remote Google
server thousands of miles away. Similarly, if a scientist is asked
where is the intelligence that led you to ponder some cosmic mystery,
he will answer, “In the brain, of course --- where else could it
be?” But our minds may depend on some mysterious intelligence
infrastructure outside of our bodies.

Once
we start thinking along these lines, that our intelligence may come
partially or largely from some mysterious external reality outside of our brains, we have
opened the door to a radical new hypothesis to explain the Flynn
effect. The hypothesis is this: some external reality that is the
source of our consciousness may be deliberately causing a gradual
increase in human intelligence. This may be to help us cope with an
increasingly complex world. Or it may be to help us fulfill some
great destiny that is planned for humanity. The same reality may
have increased human intelligence at the time when humans first
started to build cities.

The
idea that human intelligence is being gradually increased by some
mysterious external power seems like a reasonable hypothesis. But
there may be one thing that argues against the very idea that human
intelligence is gradually increasing.

I
refer, of course, to the inane drivel that is the 2016 American
presidential campaign.

Postscript: The average person probably has the idea that the human brain evolved until it was large enough to allow for thinking and spirituality, at which point human culture and religion first started to emerge. The link here reports "anatomically modern" human skull remains dated to 160,000 years ago, with what a scientist describes as "full-fledged Homo sapiens features." But humans did not start engaging in symbolic behavior until about 80,000 years ago. How do we explain that? It's as if humans got some big intelligence boost 80,000 years after hominid brains reached their largest size.

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All posts on this blog are authored by Mark Mahin, and are protected by copyright. Copyright 2013-2014 by Mark Mahin. All rights reserved. Any resemblance between any fictional character and any real person is purely coincidental.